Firefox may reignite browser wars

Page Tools

The internet browser wars, dormant for several years, shows
signs of heating up again as a result of gains from a new program
called Firefox, a research report showed on Monday.

Use of Firefox, created by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation,
has grown by more than a third over the past month, research firm
WebSideStory.

In the period from November 5 to December 3, Firefox's online
usage share grew from 3.03 percent to 4.06 percent, following a 13
percent gain during the previous month.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer retains its overwhelming dominance
with 91.8 percent of the market, the report showed. But that has
slipped from over 93 percent two months ago.

Microsoft, by integrating the browser into its Windows operating
system crushed Netscape Navigator, which had been the dominant
browser in the late 1990s, effectively ending the browser wars at
the time.

But some web users are concerned about the security of internet
Explorer and have been using alternatives.

"Since June 4, when IE's usage share first began to drop due to
security concerns, IE has lost a total of 3.68 percentage points,"
WebSideStory said.

"Firefox's gains are clearly accelerating," said Rand Schulman,
WebSideStory's chief marketing officer. "Much of it has to do with
the release of Firefox's version 1.0 on November 9, after several
months of offering a preview version. Firefox's stated goal of
gaining 10 percent of the market over the next year no longer seems
unattainable."

Netscape, which is now a part of Time Warner's America Online
unit, held a 2.83 percent market share in early December, down from
3.05 percent two months earlier.

Netscape shares some of the same origins of Firefox, and
includes some of the same features including "tabbed" browsing to
allow several pages to be contained within a single window,
accessibility to search engines and pop-up blocking.